r quitting her. She
admired the white coat of armour they wore, whether bestowed on them by
their constitution or by prudence. For while combating mankind now on
Judith Marsett's behalf, personally she ran like a hare from the mere
breath of an association with the very minor sort of similar charges;
ardently she desired the esteem of mankind; she was at moments abject.
But had she actually been aware of the facts now known?

Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding
senses--and however vividly--require enlightenment of the audible and
visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them
away from a blushful dread and force the mind to know. As much as the
wilfully or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by
touch: only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse
as our society's matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized
man--a creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him--barbarously
exacts. The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is
after all in his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she
appears as a phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer;
and he insists upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he
is to have sense of surety. Many a young girl is misread by the amount
she seems to know of our construction, history, and dealings, when it
is not more than her sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the
facts of life profuse about her, and prompts her through one or other of
the instincts, often vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to
her; or haply her filly nature is having a fling at the social harness
of hypocrisy. If you (it is usually through the length of ears of
your Novelist that the privilege is yours) have overheard queer
communications passing between girls, and you must act the traitor
eavesdropper or Achilles masquerader to overhear so clearly, these,
be assured, are not specially the signs of their corruptness. Even the
exceptionally cynical are chiefly to be accused of bad manners. Your
Moralist is a myopic preacher, when he stamps infamy, on them, or on our
later generation, for the kick they have at grandmother decorum, because
you do not or cannot conceal from them the grinning skeleton behind it.

Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to love in return
for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not